Walter Rossiter Robinson III (July 18, 1950 – February 9, 2025), also known as Mike Robinson, was an American painter, publisher, art curator, and art writer, based in New York City.Walter Robinson obituary Artnet He was called a Neo-pop painter, as well as a member of the 1980s Pictures Generation. Robinson was the subject of the 632 page book A Kiss Before Dying: Walter Robinson – A Painter of Pictures and Arbiter of Critical Pleasures by Richard Milazzo published in 2021 with an Italian translation by Ginevra Quadrio Curzio. In 2025, Robinson was bestowed a posthumous doctorate degree in Fine Art from the New York Academy of Art, who also created The Walter Robinson Scholarship in his name. Walter Robinson’s Legacy Is Celebrated With Honorary Doctorate, New Scholarship, by Katya Kazakina, Artnet News.

Background Robinson was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on July 18, 1950, and was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He moved to New York City to attend Columbia University in 1968.Walter Robinson Subsequently, he graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1973. He lived in SoHo in the 1970s and on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side in the 1980s and 1990s, and lived uptown with a studio in Long Island City in Queens.

Painting career Robinson was a postmodern painter whose work features painterly images taken from covers of romance novel paperbacks as well as still lifes of cheeseburgers, French fries, and beer, and pharmaceutical products such as aspirin and nasal spray. He also made and exhibited large-scale spin paintings in the mid-1980s, in advance of his colleague Damien Hirst.

A 2014 touring exhibition of Robinson's paintings included more than 90 works dating from 1979 to 2014. It premiered at the University Galleries at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, and subsequently appeared in Philadelphia at the Moore College of Art. The show's final stop was at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City in September 2016.

Robinson's works have been exhibited at several New York galleries since the 1980s, including Semaphore Gallery and Metro Pictures Gallery. An exhibition of his paintings, paired with a poem by Charles Bukowski, "There's a Bluebird in My Heart", was on view in Spring 2016 at the Owen James Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn."Charles Bukowski / Walter Robinson", Owen James Gallery. In 2026, Robinson received posthumously a retropective art exhibition at Gallery Jeffrey Deitch in New York City.Walter Robinson: Retropective at Jeffrey Deitch

Art criticism and other activities Robinson began writing about art in the 1970s, when he co-founded with Edit DeAk the art zine Art-Rite in New York's SoHo art district.

Robinson subsequently served as news editor of Art in America magazine (1980–96) and founding editor of Artnet magazine (1996–2012). In 2013–14, he was a columnist for Artspace.com, where his seminal essay on "Zombie Formalism" appeared. He also served as art editor of the East Village Eye in the early 1980s.

Robinson was also active in Collaborative Projects (aka Colab) in the early 1980s, acting as president for a short time and participating in The Times Square Show.

In the 1990s, he was a correspondent for GalleryBeat TV, a public-access television show.

Personal life and death Robinson was married four times; his second wife, Beatrice Smith, was sculptor Tony Smith's daughter. She died from AIDS-related complications in 1988, and after her death, Robinson adopted her daughter. At the time of his death, he lived in Manhattan with his fourth wife, Lisa Rosen.

Robinson died from liver cancer (also reported as esophageal cancer) at home on February 9, 2025, at the age of 74.

References

Further reading McCormick, Carlo, & Walter Robinson, "Slouching Toward Avenue D", Art in America, 1982. Moore, Alan W. and Marc Miller, eds. ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery New York: ABC No Rio with Collaborative Projects, 1985. McCormick, Carlo, The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984, Princeton University Press, 2006.

External links "Walter Robinson: artist and critic, former editor-in-chief of ArtNet Magazine" at The Conversation: An Artist Podcast, August 25, 2014. Walter Robinson interviewed by Phong Bui at The Brooklyn Rail, November 2014.